Seattle School Board to Parents, Teachers & Seattle Times Editorial Board - FU
Update: here is the agenda with the single BAR (Board Action Report) and Jones' new contract. Of interest:
- The amount of the base salary in the BAR is $366K and the amount of the base salary in the contract is $335,000. I think what may have happened is that the TOTAL with benefits is $366K. Whether that is the case, they need to get alignment in both documents; otherwise, the Board is voting for one thing and Hersey signing for another.
The base of $335,000 is up from the interim amount of $315K.
- This is a two-year contract which is a little odd because usually they want a three-year contract. Hmm
- This contract would supersede the interim superintendent contract so Jones would immediately get his new salary.
- He gets 13 paid holidays (it was 12 but they inserted Juneteenth).
- He gets $700 a month for using his own car.
- He gets $1,000 a year towards life insurance but the contract does not stipulate that it has to be used for that.
- For his retirement account, he gets 9% of his salary each year put in. This is not considered salary compensation.
- His per diem is $1288.42.
- The Board will have a Work Session by May 20th about communications between the Superintendent and the Board. Why then? I have no idea.
I will not be able to listen in today but I will tomorrow to learn what is said.
End of update.
A notice was posted from the School Board office for a remote meeting tomorrow, Friday Wednesday, March 11th, from 4:30-5:30 pm:
Board Special Meeting: Action Item: Hiring of Dr. Brent C. Jones as Superintendent and approval of Superintendent’s Employment Agreement
Given that the majority of the Board has already expressed their support for Dr. Jones, I assume this will be a cheerleading session and then a quick vote. (Given she voted no at the meeting last week, I'm assuming Director Leslie Harris is still going to vote no or abstain. I would be surprised if it's a unanimous vote.)
I say again that this kind of action is quite authoritarian but doesn't surprise me. Director Hampson and President Hersey seem to be operating on this "you elected us and therefore anything we do should be fine with you." I find that quite odd.
Let's take the groups who might be unhappy, one by one.
Parents - Well, they were given zero opportunity to weigh in on this hire. There was no survey, no online or in-person meetings, nada. I suppose you could have always sent an email except that the Board didn't even ask for that.
In short, they don't care what you think.
I do want to note that the readership here has been ticking back up and what is the story with the most clicks? The one about principals. Parents care deeply about who leads their child's school and yet there are many schools where parents are left in the dark about issues with principals. Members of the Board never seem to get this.
Teachers - Yesterday, the SEA had a statement of unhappiness over the Superintendent's seemingly unilateral decision to lift the mask mandate this Monday, the 14th. SEA says they were negotiating over this issue so that decision came as a surprise to them.
Now whether the mandate should be lifted is NOT the point in this discussion. It's whether Dr. Jones will be going into his permanent role status with teachers feeling good about him. Yesterday they said:
We had hoped for a better start to Dr. Jones' permanent tenure. He was lauded for the stability he created and his ability to work with labor and others, but today he failed. SEA was making progress in our relationship but we now have serious concerns about his leadership. Sadly, our trust has been shaken and we have gone backwards. This does not bode well for future negotiations.
Well so much for a honeymoon period.
Seattle Times Editorial Board - Naturally, the Board owes that small group of people nothing. However, it is the largest newspaper in the state and a big voice in Seattle. They plainly said the truth:
AndGovernment bodies can’t fast-forward through transparent processes just because they think they know the right answer.
Still, they (the Board) denied Jones the opportunity to showcase those qualities in a public process that truly engaged and energized the school community.
I wonder -for the umpteenth time - what's the rush? Did Mayor Harrell weigh in with the Board and tell them to keep going? Why couldn't the Board wait for the next Board meeting which is - checks notes - next Wednesday, the 16th?
Again, I believe they have violated both an RCW and their own policies. I'll let you know who you can report this to because they should have to be held accountable.
Comments
It is abundantly clear that Hampson, Hersey and her SCPTSA pals ran a campaign to support Jones. Get a few voices from the city and call it good.
Jones plans for the district are unknown.
The result is going to be a massive public revolt, led by the ouster of Hampson and Rankin at next year's elections, but perhaps also accompanied by a much more extensive cleaning out of the JSCEE and a major restructuring of how the district operates. You cannot govern a public school district from the top down and with such brazen hostility to its parents and teachers, as San Francisco's school board recently discovered. A huge reckoning is brewing.
Fight Back
Is this the way our city operates now, on executive decision? Have your leaders over-learned a lesson, or taken the wrong moral from the story of the frustration that many feel about how the city has been run the past few years? If so, this is a terrible trend.
Kay
Too Late
But now suddenly there seems to be a huge rift between SEA and the other two legs of the stool, at least regarding the mask mandate and the management style of the new supt. What's going on there?
As to the choice of Brent Jones -- maybe it's merciful and not so bad that they didn't do a fake search, and waste the time of a couple of no-chance candidates from another city, just to dress up the foregone conclusion of choosing Jones. This school board does not do authentic community engagement. Either they orchestrate fake engagement, or go through the motions with every intention of ignoring community feedback. We are through the looking glass with this board, where lack of transparency is in a strange way more transparent than a pretend process.
The right response from parents at this point is learned helplessness. All I hear at the dinner table now days is how much my kids hate school, and there is no chance anything will change before we age off the system. Yet still housing prices soar. The future of Seattle seems to be DADU and a dog.
There needs to be an in person meeting.
Shameful that board President Hersey is trying to ram through Jones appointment without public comment should disqualify him from holding public office- especiall when the district's largest labor partner is calling for the meeting to be delayed and for public comment to be allowed.
Board members should alllow for public comment. This is shameful.
B.C.
PTA's and PTSA's typically don't either, because they would need to send out surveys or something to do this. And the SCPTSA never surveys the PTA's and PTSA's what they think about things. Never. And Hampson and Rankin even have had autoresponders on their SPS email saying don't bug them!
Half of the dust-up between Scarlett, al Ansi, and Hampson has to do with the former two wanted to do real engagement with communities, and Hampson (and presumably Hersey and Rankin) did not! I mean, the lack of real engagement is leading to huge outside consultant fees and lawsuit expenses. The expense of hiring the consultant for the superintendent search is big money down the drain. The culture of non-engagement is not a trivial problem.
And all the "task forces" the district runs? They're also all fake. They take up the valuable time of parents, teachers, principals etc. sometimes for 1-2 years with rush-hour meetings at hard-to-reach locations. People devote hours upon hours listening to experts and come up with recommendations, and the district and board never ever ever adopt any recommendations. Because they knew what they wanted to do before they ran the task force and they keep expecting the task forces to come to the same conclusions they do (but they don't). Note to parents new to the district: never ever ever volunteer for a task force. They won't listen to what you come up with. You are wasting your time. This bad faith fake engagement has been going on for years. Board members should criticize and call this pattern out.
We all know the board and district don't engage. Every single one of us. Do they think we don't know?? They tell OSPI and the politicians, and the sycophantic reporters that pretend to cover education locally, that they do engage, and they tell us to our faces that they do engage. But they do not.
The two exceptions are Harris, who routinely calls this out, and Sarju, I've noticed her call out fake engagement at least once in the past few weeks. Other board directors should be more forceful in calling this out since we all know it's going on.
Gaslighted
Fight Back
Hot Air
Joanna, you might have missed that the Board IS paying for a new governance system via the Council of Great City Schools (and I suspect it is costing a lot). https://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/2022/01/do-you-know-about-sofg.html
BC, great thoughts.
Gaslighted, also great thoughts. I concur - never volunteer to be on a task force or committee. They are using you and you will put time and effort into the work and the Board and Superintendent will promptly ignore it or use parts of it for their own ends.
As a former co-president of a PTSA, I can tell you that it is rare for ANY district-wide issue to come to PTAs and get voted on. And, when the SCPTSA says they voted, they mean just their well-curated Board voted. And when they say they did "community engagement" they never say what community, when or how.
Directors and Interim Supt Jones,
By forcing through this permanent appointment of Jones as superintendent in this surreptitious manner and sham process, you are violating board policy, all principles of good governance, and essentially raising a middle finger to the communities and families of SPS, along with teachers and principals, whom you denied the chance to meet with or vet Dr. Jones, or any other candidates.
You also reneged on your promise to conduct a legitimate, transparent public search with multiple candidates.
You wasted $41,000+ public funds on a farce of a search by hiring a search firm with apparently no intention of searching for anyone else.
You violated public trust, and you lied.
You are also damaging the reputation of Dr. Jones by not allowing him the possibility to be legitimately vetted and earn the position with public support.
This is a rushed job by the board majority who are clearly more interested in power than good governance. It smacks of a guilty conscience, disregard for the greater SPS community and democratic and professional process.
Why are you rushing? What have you got to hide? Even if Dr. Jones were the best candidate, the public and SPS community will never have any way to be certain.
When another rogue SPS board tried to do the same thing back in 2014, renege on their promise to conduct a transparent search for a superintendent with public input, and instead disregarded the public outcry from SPS families, as well as key district partners, the teachers union and principals association, two of us on the board refused to go along with that shameful process: Betty Patu and I voted No.
I urge you to do the same. Please, show some integrity.
I also urge Dr. Jones not to accept this appointment under these terms. It would be a clear demonstration of true leadership and integrity.
The interim superintendent, Larry Nyland, was made permanent in a 5-2 vote, and that caused lasting damage to the board and Nyland's own reputation. His contract was not renewed by the following board.
Sincerely,
Sue Peters
SPS director 2013-17 (president 2016-17), and SPS parent for 16 years.
And, yes, this and all board meetings need to be held in person. School has been in person since the start of the school year. If it's good enough for students and teachers and school staff, it's good enough for the board. I believe that they are hiding from the public as they betray the the entire SPS community, and any hope for good governance.
Also, Ms. Peters is correct, Supt. Jones could show leadership and integrity by refusing appointment under these terms. Unfortunately, a letter re the end of masking from Supt. Jones to SPS staff and community, doesn't bode well. He closed out this letter with this bizarre statement: "My initial perception was that SEA leadership was on board with the need for this decision after our early conversations.” Whatever his "perceptions," the fact is that this is a change in the MOU and must be negotiated with SEA, whether he likes that or not. What a dishonest and disrespectful start for his time as superintendent.
There was NO committee meeting.
Comments were not permitted.
The item was Intro AND Action
The meeting was a total of 8 minutes. The meeting would have been shorter except legal had to weigh in on dollar figure.
Sarju was happy that the meeting was 8 minutes because she wanted to attend her daughter's backetball team.
The motion passed. Leslie Harris was the only board member to vote NO.
All baord members looked resolute.
Shameful. Absolutely shameful.